Kevin Appel
KEVIN APPEL
13 March - 19 April 2014
Selected Works
Press Release
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Kevin Appel. The exhibition will open 13 March and will remain on view through 19 April 2014. A public reception for the artist will be held on 13 March from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.
Using his photographs as a ground on which to build paintings, Appel applies layers of paint to the mechanically printed image on each canvas. He is responding to that which could be interpreted as a complete photographic image by obstructing and compressing the space with a screen of paint to bring the two methods of viewing contentiously together as the viewer looks through one element to another and back. The abstract application of paint on the surface and a photographic representation of another time and place masked in the background create layers, each obliterating the last.
The discarded desert landscape churns below the painted surface, in and out of view, often recalling gestural brushwork while giving the abstractions a sense of deep space. Alternately, the painted surface exhibits strong compositions with deliberate application of oil and acrylic paint in hard-edge geometric patterns and forms derived from the built environment.
In these new works, Appel furthers his ongoing contemplation of the compromised landscapes and failed utopias endemic to Southern California. Appel focuses on the developed and underdeveloped layers that constitute the collage-like, organic nature of Los Angeles and its surrounding desert. In these environments, he focuses on a subject that has collapsed on itself projecting a sense of the catastrophic. For Appel, this is not a negative or grim fact. Rather it is what interests him about the urban environment specific to the terrain in which he dwells.
KEVIN APPEL was born in 1967 in Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Parsons School of Design in New York in 1990 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. The artist is the recipient of the 2011 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Appel has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions, including “Paintings,” Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; “Drawings,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA; and “Descripcion sin lugar: Una seleccion de obras de Kevin Appel,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico. He has also had exhibitions at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; Wilkinson Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; among others.
Group exhibitions include “Kevin Appel, Canon Hudson, Betsy Lin Seder,” Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “LANY,” Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY; “Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa,” San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; “Painting at the Edge of the World,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and “Abstract Painting Once Removed,” Contemporary Arts Center, Houston, TX; among others.
Appel’s work may be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; The New York Public Library, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Logan Collection, Vail, CO; and the Saatchi Collection, London, United Kingdom.
Kevin Appel lives and works in Los Angeles.
News
Kevin Appel
The Ghost of Architecture: Recent and Promised Gifts
Henry Art Gallery, Univ. of Wash. 13 July - 29 September 2013
The Ghost of Architecture celebrates the addition of important works of art to the Henry’s permanent collection in the last five years.
Curated from recent gifts and promised gifts to the collection, the exhibition focuses on contemporary works that invoke architecture without citing it directly. Architecture or the architectural dimension is referenced by the artists in the show, either as a displaced or isolated fragment, as fantasy or folly, as the site of ordinary or extraordinary events, or as memory or the missing context in larger narratives.
Installation photography R.J. Sánchez
Kevin Appel
Levity/Gravity
IN/SITU: EXPO CHICAGO, 19 - 22 September 2013
EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art, is proud to announce the following list of artists that will participate in IN/SITU. Curated by Shamim M. Momin, Director, Curator, and co-founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), IN/SITU is a key element of the exposition's innovative artistic programming, providing the opportunity for exhibitors to showcase large-scale installations, site-specific and performative works by select international artists. Under the title, “Levity/Gravity,” the program includes work from Diana Al-Hadid, Kevin Appel, Sanford Biggers, Jose Dávila, Dan Gunn, Karl Haendel, Glenn Kaino, Andreas Lolis, Michael Rakowitz, Shinique Smith and Alec Soth.
Kevin Appel
Painting in Place
Los Angeles Nomadic Division, 22 May - 31 July 2013
Painting in Place is a group exhibition of contemporary painting which will be presented in the historic Farmers and Merchants Bank in Downtown Los Angeles (401 South Main Street Los Angeles, CA 90013).
The exhibition will present a wide array of work from contemporary artists that tackle painting from various perspectives, using both traditional and unconventional techniques and media in their approach to the discipline. Exploring various ways sculpture, and installation: blurred, deconstructed, and refigured.
Kevin Appel
Q + A by Jill Singer
SightUnseen.com, 14 March 2013
Q+A with Kevin Appel, by Jill Singer
In the long list of ways that New York differs from Los Angeles, we’ve always been particularly fascinated by one: New York can be a very physically demanding place to live, but it is not a difficult city to understand on a psychological level. In Los Angeles, the living is easier, but there seems to be – especially among artists – a constant grappling to define and understand LA as a place. LA artist Kevin Appel explains it this way: “Los Angeles has always had a bit of an identity crisis partially due to the external view of LA as having this superficial mentality tied to the film industry. It doesn’t have a long lineage of a canonical or intellectual history, as opposed to New York.” He should know: Appel is a native Angeleno who has called the city home for almost his entire life – save for a brief stint at Parsons for his BFA – and he’s been steeped in the city’s history and vocabulary since birth. Growing up, his father was an architect and his mother an interior designer, so it makes sense that the city’s structures and surroundings would eventually become his subject matter.